An email with the subject of Confirm PO 602130 coming from various compromised / hacked email addresses with a lzh (zip) attachment delivers Pony / Fareit trojan. We first saw the use of .LZH file attachments spreading pony / fareit trojan in this post last Thursday.

This particular campaign is unusual because of the attachment. It is very unusual to see .lzh attachments which many versions of windows don’t natively open or extract from. It is a fairly commonly used format in Japan and I understand that Japanese language versions of windows have inbuilt support for it, but most other versions do not. It does extract easily using winzip.

They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium size businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from consumers.

So far I have received these from:

server1@e-marketsgroup.com

server1@lights-colors.com

It looks like both domains have been hacked and had their email account or other servers compromised. They are sending the emails to you. See headers Info below. Both sites are hosted on vps12966.inmotionhosting.com. I therefore suspect that it is possible that the VPS has been compromised rather than the 2 individual email accounts being individually compromised. Last Thursday’s campaign also came via another VPS on inmotionhosting. It looks like from the email headers that they are using webmail login rather than smtp sending. They pass all email authentication checks, including SPF & DKIM because they do come from the compromised accounts. That means they stand a much higher chance of being delivered to the unsuspecting recipients, many of whom will be small companies who do deal with numerous international companies and will be more likely to open the email attachment.

Both compromised domains are using WordPress for their CMS. One is also also using Wordfence security plugin ( the second one has references to Wordfence in code but I can’t see the actual plugin listed, but I also cannot see it listed in the site displaying the errors, which only appear intermittently and not on every visit to the site) .http://www.e-marketsgroup.com/ is showing errors in the WordFence plugin. I don’t know if the hackers have found an exploit or way to compromise wordfence or if WordFence is actually blocking attack attempts but this needs looking into. Error messages should not be displayed to anybody connecting when WordPress is working correctly.

These malicious attachments normally have a password stealing component, with the aim of stealing your bank, PayPal or other financial details along with your email or FTP ( web space) log in credentials. Many of them are also designed to specifically steal your Facebook and other social network log in details. A very high proportion are Ransomware versions that encrypt your files and demand money ( about £350/$400) to recover the files.

All the alleged senders, amounts, reference numbers, Bank codes, companies, names of employees, employee positions, email addresses and phone numbers mentioned in the emails are all random. Some of these companies will exist and some won’t. Don’t try to respond by phone or email, all you will do is end up with an innocent person or company who have had their details spoofed and picked at random from a long list that the bad guys have previously found. The bad guys choose companies, Government departments and organisations with subjects that are designed to entice you or alarm you into blindly opening the attachment or clicking the link in the email to see what is happening.

This is another one of the files that unless you have “show known file extensions enabled“, can easily be mistaken for a genuine DOC / PDF / JPG or other common file instead of the .EXE / .JS file it really is, so making it much more likely for you to accidentally open it and be infected.

Be very careful with email attachments. All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day.

The basic rule is NEVER open any attachment to an email, unless you are expecting it. Now that is very easy to say but quite hard to put into practice, because we all get emails with files attached to them. Our friends and family love to send us pictures of them doing silly things, or even cute pictures of the children or pets.

Never just blindly click on the file in your email program. Always save the file to your downloads folder, so you can check it first. Many malicious files that are attached to emails will have a faked extension. That is the 3 letters at the end of the file name. Unfortunately windows by default hides the file extensions so you need to Set your folder options to “show known file types. Then when you unzip the zip file that is supposed to contain the pictures of “Sally’s dog catching a ball” or a report in word document format that work has supposedly sent you to finish working on at the weekend, or an invoice or order confirmation from some company, you can easily see if it is a picture or document & not a malicious program.

If you see JSor.EXE or .COM or .PIF or .SCR or .HTA .vbs, .wsf , .jse .jar at the end of the file name DO NOT click on it or try to open it, it will infect you.

While the malicious program is inside the zip file, it cannot harm you or automatically run. When it is just sitting unzipped in your downloads folder it won’t infect you, provided you don’t click it to run it. Just delete the zip and any extracted file and everything will be OK. You can always run a scan with your antivirus to be sure. There are some zip files that can be configured by the bad guys to automatically run the malware file when you double click the zip to extract the file. If you right click any suspicious zip file received, and select extract here or extract to folder ( after saving the zip to a folder on the computer) that risk is virtually eliminated. Never attempt to open a zip directly from your email, that is a guaranteed way to get infected. The best way is to just delete the unexpected zip and not risk any infection.